The Ongoing Struggle, and The Bullshit Poet

Black Book 97, January 27, 2018

These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose from the trees and fall. Christmas will come, then the snows of winter. You will live to enjoy the beauty of the frozen world, for you mean a great deal to Zuckerman and he will not harm you, ever. Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days….

—E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

Last night I read to Winsor from Charlotte’s Web—over the years I have read that deathless book to all of my dogs, and to a handful of children—and I was once again reminded of my old, hectoring desire to write something so beautifully simple and enduring.

That lovely book is a piece of perfect craft, and the difficulty in trying to emulate its many charms is the challenge of keeping it simple and reining in any sort of stylish impulses, in withholding the magic until it is most startling and necessary. If you’re attempting to write a story with the emotional wallop of Charlotte’s Web you have to recognize that you need to ration your small bag of fairy dust and use it sparingly. If you just toss it all over the place, you just diminish its power.

And White never loses track of the fact that he’s writing for children; unlike so many writers of children’s books today, he doesn’t write over their heads or resort to the jackhammer. Neither does he condescend.

It’s a tricky thing, and very, very few people have ever pulled it off as artfully as he did in Charlotte’s Web. I had been enchanted by children’s books before that one, but that was the first time I remember being both enchanted and devastated by a book, and I now recognize that that’s exactly the combination I’m looking for in books, movies, and any other storytelling medium. Tough and tender. It’s the essence of living and loving, obviously, and that devastation is the cost of all our attachments, the price we have to be prepared to pay again and again in this world.

I think a lot about the books from my childhood that first got me interested in the relationship between words and images. We pretty much all learned to read from the picture books our parents read to us (if we were lucky), and even today—when I spend so much of my time trying to figure out the text challenges of photographs and photobooks—I time and again return for inspiration to those early books that made the combination seem so effortless—In The Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Are, Go, Dog, Go, and, of course, Charlotte’s Web. The words and illustrations of those books remain inseparable in my memory, and I know them all by heart.

And the reasons they work so beautifully together is that the pictures and words complement and enrich each other; together they succeed in telling a story, but never the whole story. They leave space for the imagination to do its own work, and to expand whatever story is being told into intensely personal spaces, and to translate and transform it into purely private memories.

---

The Bullshit Poet

the guy seemed to to think that/all he needed to make his mark as an original writer/was to dick around with sentence structure and punctuation/using slash marks/like so/and eschewing capitalization/he wasn’t even consistent with the slash marks/sometimes he used hyphens—or lots of spaces /i guess to communicate he was/taking a breath/there weren’t even any paragraph breaks in his writing—and ive already fucked up because he didnt use apostrophes either/or obviously commas/he said he was going for a musical approach that felt as pure as unfettered consciousness/but i said all these tricks those slash marks and hyphens and other things/seemed to me hyper conscious and not unfettered in any way—he was undaunted/had been writing this way and fine tuning his style/for thirty years/never mind that it was virtually impossible to get through even a brief email from the man—never mind that to the best of my knowledge/he had never had any success getting any of his/writing published/and never mind that pretty much everything he wrote/seemed to be based on some other similarly pompous monkey business/he didnt seem to care i had to give him that/it rankled me enough though that i persisted in my criticisms/you of all people with your love of jazz and other adventurous musics—and he did say musics/maybe you should try to really listen to my words/i guess he meant this literally—because he sent me a bunch of cds/of him reading his words/in a manner that was herky jerky and ponderous—and of course incoherent/this prompted me to ask him/if he regarded his work as poetry—he responded by saying that/he wasnt interested in traditional classifications/and it is very hard for me not to resort/to quotation marks around some of his more absurd/utterances—they were he said pieces and that word was in italics as you might imagine/episodes interludes and formal movements/representing/again fragments of consciousness/those sound an awful lot like traditional classifications i said/but he merely laughed/he had recently died/he told me—he was certain he was legally dead/but had been revived by/birdsong outside his window/and while he was dead/he didnt say how long his death lasted/he had been given a glimpse/of his immortality/the future he said/would know him